NASA’s Parker Solar Probe blasts off on an epic journey to ‘the Sun’

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe blasts off from Cape Canaveral on its mission to the Sun.

CAPE CANAVERAL – NASA Parker Solar Probe has blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force station on its historic mission to the Sun.

The probe lit up the night sky as it blasted off, 3:31 pm EDT.

“It was a really clean start,” said Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters. “It was as it should be.”

#NASA ‘ s Parker #SolarProbe lights up the sky as it starts on its epic mission to the Sun pic.twitter.com/i0F1SdsHQd

— James Rogers (@jamesjrogers) August 12, 2018

“Everything was exactly as we thought it would be – it was a real book,” he added.

Carried by a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket, Parker lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 37. The launch had intially planned for early Saturday, but the last-minute technical failures ate away at the start window, which asks for a 24-hour delay.

The $1.5 billion mission will be humanity closer to the Sun than ever before. Parker will be the first spacecraft to fly by the Sun (the corona is the outermost part of the atmosphere of the star. It is expected that the Sun in November.

Parker will be confronted with “brutal” heat and radiation in an epic journey that will take you to within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface, according to the space agency. This is seven times closer than the previous closest spacecraft, Helios 2, which came within 27 million miles of the Sun in 1976.

The average distance between the Sun and the Earth is 93 million miles.

Parker should be able to withstand the heat of about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit to his daring mission. To achieve this, the probe can be protected by a special 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield. Safe in the spaceship, but the probe’s payload works at room temperature.

NASA’S PARKER SOLAR PROBE SET TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER IN CAPE CANAVERAL HISTORY

The use of Venus’ gravity, Parker will complete seven flybys more than seven years gradually its orbit closer to the Sun. At its closest approach in 2024, the probe travels approximately 430,000 km / h, setting a new speed record for a human-made object.

The Sun, the corona, which can be seen during a total solar eclipse, is mostly hidden by the bright light of the star from the surface. The probe, named after a pioneering solar physicist Dr. Eugene Parker, will be a treasure trove of valuable data.

Scientists expect that shed a new light on the Sun’s potential to disrupt satellites and spacecraft, and electronics and communication on Earth.

NASA’S PARKER SOLAR PROBE ‘TOUCH THE SUN’ ON HISTORIC MISSION

It is also hoped that the probe will give an answer on what the scientists describe as “the coronal heating problem.” One of the most special aspects of the Sun is that the atmosphere is much hotter the farther it stretches from the star’s surface, according to NASA.

The instruments on board, Parker will be the study of magnetic fields, plasma and energetic particles as well as imaging the solar wind, a stream of ionized gases that flow along the Earth at a million miles per hour.

Eugene Parker first theory is the existence of the solar wind. To honour him for his contribution to the science, the probe of NASA’s first spacecraft to the name of a living person.

WEIRD SOLAR SCIENCE: HOW NASA’S PARKER PROBE WILL DIVE THROUGH THE SUN’S ATMOSPHERE

The probe, which was designed and built by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, is also the implementation of more than 1.1 million names to the Sun. In March, members of the public were invited to be a part in the historic mission by submitting their names to be placed on a memory card that the spacecraft in space. In May, NASA confirmed that, more than seven weeks, a total of 1,137,202 names were submitted.

The memory card also contains pictures of Dr. Parker and his ground-breaking 1958 scientific article about solar wind.

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